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Chicken of the Forest--which is my description, not the recipe's--is composed of chicken breasts rubbed in rosemary and oregano and then pan-fried in olive oil. It looks like a chicken breast was dropped through a pine tree and a shrub. I wasn't sure this what the recipe intended when it said to rub the rosemary and oregano into the chicken, along with salt and a little pepper:
It just looked wrong, but in my gung-ho culinary adventure mode, I plowed on, damn the twigs and stems. This came after I sliced the chicken breast apart and pounded the resulting four pieces into roughly equal thicknesses with a meat mallet. That is strangely satisfying, and possibly a worrisome statement about my psyche, but what happens in the kitchen, stays in the kitchen, except when I want to write about it on this blog. Moving on . . .
As the olive oil started to whisper and pop, I slapped the chicken pieces down in the iron skillet. While I was attending to this, Marina was attending to the appetizers of cheese--Drunken Goat and a Havarti--and crackers, a little bit of wine, and the salad I placed on the table:
Say what you will about chicken draped in pine trees and shrubbery, it sure smells good in a frying pan, and as Marina pointed out, we would just scrape off the herbs when eating the chicken:
I was a little concerned about the flammability of this project. After all, if the forest metaphor was accurate, what would you imagine would happen if you put a bunch of trees in the midst of hot oil and turned up the heat? Exactly.
However, with the magic of cooking, no conflagrations appeared, and the chicken breast cooked exquisitely and was soon ready to be paired with couscous in a healthy, tasty, and flavorful entree.
As we ate, and before we finished, I asked Marina if I should bring out dessert. She concurred, but instead of the cookies I so cleverly mentioned, I brought out this:
As you can tell from the picture, she said yes.
Apparently, though, this was not the surprise twist I thought it was. Apparently, she suspected this was going to happen when I had declared a week earlier that I was going to cook that night. Considering how regularly I cook, I had thought this would not be a giveaway, but apparently I have no poker face. She knew for sure when I served crackers and cheese. I guess I'm not as good at surprises as I thought, although I would argue that she was probably on high alert for possible surprises, since she and I had visited the artist who made the ring about a month prior.
In any case, a very special dinner. Also tasty. The chicken, that is, not the ring. We didn't actually eat the ring, even if it was dessert.
